Ello, the new social site, down to first DDOS attack for 45 minutes

Ello, the new social networking site, which is being tipped off as the next Facebook went down for 45 minutes this past weekend due to an apparent DDOS attack.

Those who tried to visit the site on Sunday were greeted with this message.

“The site is currently unavailable while we conduct some necessary maintenance. Follow along for any updates on our status page.”

However, The Next Web reports that Ello’s status page had a rather different message, stating: “We are undergoing a potential denial of service attack.”

TechCrunch reports that the company was indeed under a Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attack and was able to block the offending IP addresses in order to get the site back online.

Ello is still experiencing some issues today though with many users posting updates on Twitter over the last couple of hours though they, at their end, claim that the issue has already been fixed by blocking the IP addresses responsible for the attack.

Ello, which has been available to the public for a little over a month now, has been gaining popularity with the social media savvy people and the tech elite rapidly, thanks to ad free interface and lot more privacy that Facebook.

It was founded by Paul Budnitz, a 47 year designer and entrepreneur from the USA, a month ago and is being pitched as an alternative to Facebook. Though it did seem like a joke at first, the speed at which it is gaining popularity has Facebook worried already.

Ello’s growing popularity, pegged at more than 35,000 people asking to sign up per hour, can be explained in two ways. Ello is something new, and that alone is enough to attract many tech enthusiasts. But Ello is also making waves after a tumultuous summer for Facebook.

In June, social network giant came under fire for manipulating the News Feeds of nearly 700,000 users as part of a study it conducted along with a couple universities. Not a month later, customers again cried foul when it began forcing customers to download a second application to their mobile devices in order to message with friends. Then, there were fears over the broad access to data the app asked for on their phones.

Ello promises it will be different. Facebook did not respond to requests for comment.

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